I'm currently on a plane returning from London to València, after my stay
with the Canonical/Rosetta guys. It's the first time I travel with my own
laptop, and one that isn't either slow or unstable as hell. Being alone for
the return flight, I decided to take out the lappy instead of my book because
I'm too sleepy to get something out from the novel I'm currently reading,
the latest book by Ferran Torrent La vida en l'abisme.

Situations like this make me think buying the powerbook was a good idea,
as right now I'm using this dead time catching up with some e-mails I had to
write weeks, in some cases months, ago, and doing some blogging about stuff
from the last four days (as you've noticed already. :)

What still sucks about planes is when the whole cabin stinks with horrible
plane food. It's even worse when companies like Iberia don't give you
any food and you're hungry...

As I write this, we're crossing over the Pyrenees, my favourite mountain
range, and just as the constant sea of clouds has disappeared, allowing me
to enjoy the air view of a new sea of white mountains. Apparently it's been
cold in Spain again while we were out. This happened just as the sun was
setting in the West. Too bad I don't own a camera yet.

Now, back to reality: the final sprint at work before our Free Software
Congress, and a lot of work to do still...

And if you didn't know yet, you should be reading
Planet Debian, to find out that I,
once considered a nice member of the Free Software community, have succumbed
to the dark forces that threaten the pureness of our hackers.

In reply to my post about my visit to London,
Beowulfblogged
about the dubious convenience of me participating in a "non-free" project as
The Launchpad. Yeah, Rosetta's code
isn't available at all. Is that enough reason to bash it non-stop? Is
Canonical expected to release everything they do from day one, or can they
decide what is more convient for them in order to build a profitable business
and continue contributing to Debian and Free Software?

Beowulf, you work for a construction company or something similar, right?
Are the specs of the projects they are working on freely available as open
content in the Internet? Does that make you feel bad?

As far as I know, you use the Linux
kernel in all or most of your computers. Maybe you should consider *BSD or
even the Hurd, as, unlike
Linux, they don't use a non-free tool like bitkeeper to manage their
development.

If I'm helping the Rosetta people with the constructive feedback I can
provide, it is because I think it's going to be a Good Thing for the
i18n communities in which I'm involved. If
Mark told me Rosetta will never
be free, I guess I would focus on helping similar projects like
Pootle, which are Free today, but
the thing is that Canonical does plan to release Rosetta and the rest of
Launchad under a DFSG-free licence. They will do it when the company is ready
to give it away, and I will happily contribute while this happens, because I
believe that Rosetta has a potential to be a revolutionary tool for Free
Software l10n, specially for language teams that don't have already established
translation teams like many African or Asian languages.

Mark invited the few Canonical people (Matt, Scott, Scott and Carlos, plus
me) that were around this appartment to the theatre yesterday evening. We chose
to see The Producers, a comedy musical that apparently has had very
good press.

We sat in a quite good spot, in the first floor ring, and could watch all
the play in detail. Scott was telling me that people at the back seats of the
second floor really need to use the goggles available at the seats (of course,
for a price, as everything in London), or you can't even distinguish the faces
of the actors.

The argument was nice and we all had a good laughs. I was suprised to be
able to follow all the argument without missing anything, as I thought I would
have trouble understanding the song lyrics, but the bits I missed (mostly
during songs sung by many people) weren't important to understand the rest.

We got out of the theatre pretty late for the UK, at half past ten, which
is even late for Spain. Gladly Scott was around and guided us to a pizza
restaurant, where we had dinner before taking the Tube back to Earl's Court
to sleep.

Arriving there at midnight, I still found shit to do at the laptop until
2AM, which made me a semi-zombie for most of today's morning. It appears I
wasn't too calm tonight again, as Carlos suffered my teeth grinding from 6 to
7AM. I need to get that looked at by the dentist...

One of the things that have surprised me most of London was the incredible
amount of teatres and musicals that are going on at the same time... the
Underground stations are full of posters with many different shows. You
certainly don't get in València, where we have just a handful of working
theatres, and normally plays aren't musical. Among the advertised shows, you
can find many different kinds of shows: from stuff like The Producers to a
representation of Winnie the Pooh. Don't ask me how you represent this
live, in a scenario, but it can be both very funny and crappy. :)

Daf, as everything else I've proposed during these five days, refused to go
see it. He also refused to, from memory, do the following activities with me,
who wanted to know a bit more of London:

take the Tube to go to Manchester or Liverpool one of the evenings,
"because they are in Zone 1,500 and your card is only for card 1"

climb up to one of those roofs with many chimneys to sing the Mary Poppins
song, "because I don't know that song" (OMG, he hasn't seen Mary Poppins)

on our way back from lunch on Monday, to sit down in a bench in the street
until 20:00 when we would go for lunch. He was unable to give a valid reason
to refuse this offer

So thanks to daf this trip to the UK wasn't more enjoyable that it has been.
I will take revenge next week, though, as he'll be in Valencia at
Carlos' place for a two-week Rosetta
hacking sprint. If he proposes jumping off the Micalet with a parachute, I will
find a poor excuse and say no.

This is not the first time I try to do this, but being used to mentally
correct zsh's misshandling of UTF-8 input in the command line isn't the way
one should be working everyday. While bash reportedly still has a few
UTF-8/char vs. byte problems, I haven't found them yet. Zsh, on the other hand,
makes me do weird stuff like backspacing twice, then Ctrl-l'ing to redisplay
when I press ç instead of Enter, for example.

Of course, you can get used to this behaviour and end up doing the double
backspacing without even noticing, and that's why I've been using zsh on a
UTF-8 locale for years.

Switching to bash is a step backwards. I know many will argue it's not, but
I really think it is. There are some features in zsh that AFAIK you can't
get done in bash. While bash completion has gotten a lot better in the last
years thanks to the bash_completion package, zsh's is just so much better.
I'll have to get used, I guess. Or I'll switch back, which is what happened the
last three times I tried to do this.